"Kanata" Don Gillmor

Kanata: An Interview with Don Gillmor about the Stories of our Country

Kanata is an Iroquoian word that means village or settlement and it's believed to be the he origin for the word Canada...

It's also the name of Don Gillmor's 12th book and his first novel.

It's a big sprawling book -- big in its ambition and sprawling in its scope.

Don Gillmor has taken it upon himself to tell the story of Canada, or a good chunk of it, in a fictionalized version of the adventures of David Thompson, the cartographer who put this country on the map...literally. 

 Thompson was Canada's most important mapmaker - and in the course of charting the country he walked and paddled 80,000 miles and mapped almost two million square miles.

The novel embraces a wide swath of Canadian history - from colonial days to a hundred years after Confederation - and it's a tapestry of times and personalities that, sewn together, create a picture of a nation.

Don Gillmor is an accomplished writer and journalist. In addition to his non-fiction and children's books, he's contributed to a number of magazines including Rolling Stone, GQ, Premiere, Saturday Night and The Walrus.

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